The Caldwell Field House is a memorial to Charles W. Caldwell, Jr. '25, head coach of football from 1945 through 1956. It was built in 1963 with donations from his family and from some 3,500 alumni and friends.

As an undergraduate, Caldwell played center and fullback on Roper's 1922 "Team of Destiny" and was a star pitcher on the baseball team (he later had a tryout with the New York Yankees and played briefly in several games). He was assistant football coach at Princeton for three years, and head coach at Williams for seventeen, before his appointment as Princeton's head coach in 1945. A keen student of the game, he developed a new kind of single wing football, adding to the traditional power plays of that formation elements of deception, which he borrowed from the modern T.

One of Caldwell's favorite words for an effective team or player was "solid." Another, which he used to describe a quality he thought indispensable to success was "desire." He himself possessed abundant desire, and the results he obtained in the dozen years he was coach were eminently solid. His teams won six successive Big Three championships in the years 1947 through 1952, two more than the previous record, which Harvard teams set under Percy Haughton in the years 1912 through 1915. Caldwell's teams of 1950 and 1951, both Lambert Trophy winners as the best in the East, won every game -- the first time Princeton had two perfect seasons in succession since full-length schedules were introduced in 1878 (the teams of 1874 and 1875 won all their games -- two each). Caldwell was voted Coach of the Year in 1950 and given the annual award of the Touchdown Club of New York in 1952. He was stricken with cancer of the pancreas early in the season of 1957 and died November 1 in his fifty-sixth year. President Goheen summed up his career succinctly: ``Charlie was an inspiring teacher who devoted his life to the education of young men.''

The Caldwell Field House contains dressing and training facilities for teams that use the neighboring athletic facilities -- Palmer Stadium, the Jadwin Gymnasium, and a half-dozen playing fields. The Field House is larger than it looks -- only one of its two-and-a-half stories shows above ground level -- and, because of its flexible design, more serviceable even than its true size would suggest. Dressing rooms are convertible to dormitories for visiting teams, and coaches' offices to dressing rooms for officials at game time. The Glass of 1925 Room, a pine-paneled carpeted lounge, is used by coaches for conferences with their staffs and their teams, and by families of players waiting to meet them at the end of a game. A medical treatment center is equipped for treating sprained muscles, wrenched joints, and other aches and pains suffered in contact sports.

Caldwell is also remembered by a trophy, established by the undergraduate body in 1957, awarded annually to that senior on the varsity football squad who has shown the greatest improvement.

Source: Leitch p. 72 ff

Caldwell Field House in Evolution of the Campus

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